In response to the factoid given that 40% of Easten European Jews are descended from four women, did anyone else think of the Biblical Jacob and his two wives Leah and Rachel, as well as their maidservants he had children by Bilhah and Zilpah?
shareThis wouldn't surprise me in the least since those 4 women are well known in both the Christian and Jewish communities for being the mothers of the 12 tribes of Isreal and for being Jacobs wives. His family's story is among my favorites in the Bible.
shareThe four women are actually forebearers to around 40% of European Jews (Ashkenazim) going back about 1,000 years, which is a full 1,000 years AFTER the destruction of the Jewish Temple in Israel at the hands of the Roman Empire. These four women basically have Semitic ancestry that is similar to millions of Non-Jewish Semites who currently live in and around the Middle-East and abroad where descendents of Semites live.
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Actually, a 2013 study revealed that the four women were actually Mediterranean Europeans, after further genetic analysis. This episode was aired prior to these studies. So the Ashkenazi gene pool is comprised of roughly 50% European & 50% Levantine ancestry, with the female forbearers being of Southwestern European extract.
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If being Jewish is matrilineal then does that means most Ashkenazis aren't really Jewish?
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The original articles about these four ancesters appeared in 2006, around ten years ago when far less was known about using DNA for ancestral research. However, mitochondrial DNA or mtDNA is what traces mother-to-mother back through the generations. That information is still valid. However, what it means was that the ancestry is still somewhat speculative. The following is from an article that appeared in 2013 in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/09/science/ashkenazi-origins-may-be-with-european-women-study-finds.html?_r=0):
"A new genetic analysis has now filled in another piece of the origins puzzle, pointing to European women as the principal female founders, and to the Jewish community of the early Roman empire as the possible source of the Ashkenazi ancestors.
The finding establishes that the women who founded the Ashkenazi Jewish community of Europe were not from the Near East, as previously supposed, and reinforces the idea that many Jewish communities outside Israel were founded by single men who married and converted local women.
The study, published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, is based on a genetic analysis of maternal lineages. A team led by Martin B. Richards of the University of Huddersfield in England took a fresh look at Ashkenazi lineages by decoding the entire mitochondrial genomes of people from Europe and the Near East.
Earlier DNA studies showed that Jewish communities around the world had been founded by men whose Y chromosomes bore DNA patterns typically found in the Near East. But there was a surprise when geneticists turned to examine the women founders by analyzing mitochondrial DNA, a genetic element that is separate from the main human genome and inherited just through the female line.
Unlike the Y chromosomes, the mitochondrial DNA showed no common pattern. In several of the smaller Jewish communities it clearly resembled that of the surrounding population, suggesting a migration pattern in which the men had arrived single, perhaps as traders, and taken local wives who then converted to Judaism."
So much for what is now popular press, but the next paragraph says it all:
"But it wasn’t clear whether or not this was true of the Ashkenazim. Mitochondrial DNA tends to change quite rapidly, or to drift, as geneticists say, and the Ashkenazi DNA has drifted so far it was hard to pinpoint its origin."
So that fact remains that the origin is not really known and the only way that will happen is when the findings are support by some kind of better documentation. Like a lot of elements in science, much of what we "know" is still speculation.